Wow. 9000 days ago, I made the first entry in an online journal. 24 years later, I’m still here writing.
I wrote about the demise of Mint a couple of years ago, after Intuit killed it to force users to buy TurboTax or whatever bullshit system they want to charge for. We used it for several years off and on to get on top of our finances, with limited success, but that was mainly because we hadn’t set it up correctly. Recently we engaged the services of a financial planner to get on top of our retirement, and through the process of filling out his intake checklist and our initial meeting we realized we had several major blank spots in our spending. We left that meeting with some homework—mainly, figuring out what is going into those blank spots.
After doing some very basic searching, I was pointed at a service called Monarch through some glowing reviews. Basically, it’s a paid online version of Mint, and from all I’ve seen so far, I’d wager the key brains from Mint went out on their own and re-created that service. I signed up for a trial, started plugging my accounts in, and within about 20 mintes had a rough picture of my accounts and those I share with Jen; after she adds hers in we’ll have a much clearer picture of what’s going in and what’s coming out. I’m glad this exists—I was not looking forward to going through my statements line by line.
Renie gave us her old Apple Watch when I was up there a few weeks ago, as she upgraded to the newest and latest. She figured Finn might like one, but we decided (based on our daughter’s spotty record with expensive electronics) that we should hold off. So I decided I’d swap Renie’s Series 4 for my Series 3. What her watch adds are a bunch of biometric features the Series 3 didn’t have, like comprehensive sleep data and better heart and health monitoring. I’ve been wearing it pretty regularly since I came back, and it’s given me some insights into how much good sleep I’m getting (not as much as I need) and where my heart rate (still lower than a snake’s belly) and exercise numbers (definitely not as good as they should be) are. So I cut my nightly beer out this week to see if that helps with my sleep, and even though it’s getting colder in the mornings, I’m re-committing to walking Hazel as much as possible. Thanks Ren!
Once I got my own apartment in college, and was too poor to afford my own Mister Coffee drip-coffee machine, I resorted to a single cup pour-over jawn, which I filled by heating water in a pot on the stove. And here I need to take a minute. Because when I walk into a bougie café now and see “pour-over” as a special bullshit bespoke option I cannot help thinking that people are suckers. That’s how I made my coffee when I was too poor to make it any other way.
Mike Montiero, author of Design Is a Job and What Is a Designer? writes about coffee in his newsletter.
I’m currently using a pour-over setup after having cycled through my camping percolator (RIP) Jen’s one-cup coffee machine (RIP), several French presses, a brief attempt at an Aeropress (did not live up to the hype) and back to a French press. I like the pour-over but have been keeping an eye out for another cheap percolator at the thrift store—I did enjoy the coffee it brewed, and now that I have beans I like, I want to give it a try again. (He expresses a love for dark roast, which to me tastes like wet, burned paper towels).
Today I sat behind my desk for work for the first time in five weeks after taking my second sabbatical at WRI. Having time away to clear one’s head is a very rare and valuable perk that my organization offers, and while I haven’t been able to take advantage of it the same way some of my colleagues have (globe-trotting trips to exotic locales, for example) I’ve been able to take time away to focus on my family, my hobbies, my friends, and my life outside of work, which has been worth every minute—and a lot cheaper than plane tickets.
As mentioned here, I’ve spent time working on an EV swap project with my friend Brian, spent a week in New York State with my family, and I took care of several long-delayed tasks that required time and focus to complete. I also did a bunch of boring house maintenance, including a paint job on the back two sides of the garage.
It’s going to be very hard adjusting to rising early in the morning to get Finn off to school, getting myself cleaned up and presentable, and hopping on the train again, especially as the days are getting colder and the darkness is getting longer.
I spent the majority of last week at Brian’s house working with him on his Scout EV project, which was fantastic. We got a ton of work done and are at a stopping point until we have more information from the wiring harness manufacturer and another guy who machines adapter sleeves and plates for the EV motor -> manual transmission.
I’m coming up with a checklist of stuff I have to shoot while I’m working, because I continually forget to do stuff like stop and explain what I’m doing and why. Upon assembling the footage for Monday, I realized I never had Brian walk through the history of his truck and why he’s tackling this project. Luckily we’re gathering for a workday this coming weekend and I can film him while he’s here for the next installment.
I came back Thursday night and spent a quiet Friday with Jen, which we both needed, while Finn was at a badminton game. And yesterday, while it rained off and on outside, I sat next to Finn while she caught up on homework and edited the first full day of the EV project video, which timed out at ~40 minutes. I’ve got enough footage to space these out for the next four weeks plus any truck updates I can get to this week. And at lunchtime I ran out and got my fingerprints done again and my CCL application in to the State Police, so I can be legal on the way to the range.
Being an adult means you can make a command decision for the family and make dinner a medium shake at the Baskin Robbins down the street. It also means the vestigial amounts of caffeine in the Jamocha ice cream will keep you up until 3AM questioning your life choices.
As I get older I’m affected more and more by cold weather. The prospect of taking the dog out for a well-deserved walk fills me with dread. Our 100-year-old house is one large draft covered by a roof; there are few places it’s easy to remain toasty without sitting under a pile of blankets. I’ve spent twenty years attempting to fill cracks, upgrade windows, add insulation, improve heating, and plug holes, but it still has little effect. My hands become icicles in October and don’t thaw until April. I lose all contact with my toes sometime around Thanksgiving and pray it returns for my birthday. This is partially due to my age and partially to my body type; I lose heat quickly even on warm days, and it’s only gotten worse since my 40th birthday.
A couple of years ago I found a couple of long-sleeve shirts on the rack at our local thrift store and grabbed them up; among them was an Under Armour shirt I wound up wearing a lot because the sleeves didn’t shrink after the first wash. This has been one of my pet peeves for years: I buy a longsleeve shirt and after two runs through the wash the cuffs only come down to the middle of my forearms (Gilden, Champion, I’m looking at you). The Under Armour shirt held up well and didn’t shrink, so I started looking for them specifically on our visits. A year or so after that I found another, which said “ColdGear” on the tag. Intrigued, I tried it on, and found it was skin-tight, but felt warm, so I spent $6 on it.
What I found after wearing it on cold days was that it did keep me warm—far better than other shirts I’ve tried, and much more comfortable than multiple layers. It kept my upper core warm during snowboard trips, frigid junkyard runs, shoveling snow, and walking Hazel. So much so that I took my jacket off and stuffed it into my backpack the last time we went snowboarding. On subsequent thrifting visits, I found more of them, and stocked up for cold weather. They take some getting used to; I’m not normally a skin-tight kind of guy. After a day, they irritate my surgery scar—almost as much as wearing a fleece with a full zipper—but the warmth is worth it.
The next issue has been my feet. They only have two temperatures: sweating and freezing. They know no middle ground; they are as impossible to regulate as an overtired toddler on a candy binge. Any socks I have ever worn make my feet sweat, making the socks damp. In the winter, they will then freeze over into solid ice; in the summer they become a fetid swamp. This also limits the kind of shoes I can wear. Any shoe with lots of fabric padding inside will become intolerable within weeks. I’ve found that Nike running shoes made of thin webbing are the best summer shoes; meanwhile I have a pair of leather Keen shoes that are at least 15 years old I wear almost exclusively in the winter. The soles have been reglued twice; I will weep when they finally fall apart.
It comes down to the socks. I wore cotton socks for years, but they were no good. Even looking at polyester socks made my feet sweat. Some of the blends worked better than others; Timberland makes a sock I’ve been wearing for a couple of years that seems to work for fall and spring. A couple of Christmases ago, my sister got me a pair of SmartWool socks and these became the go-to for winter. I wore that pair so much, I bought a couple more on sale.
Over the Thanksgiving break, I used these as my base layers along with a pair of bike tights for the junkyard run I made. I also had the good fortune of borrowing a set of insulated Wellington boots from my brother in law, which made a huge difference. It got to the point where I had stripped down to my jeans and fleece. Bike tights are pretty good, but I think I’m going to buy a pair of ColdGear leggings for our next snowboard trip.
This week it’s Love Spreads by the Stone Roses. I actually bought their second album before I’d heard the first one; the sound of the band had changed dramatically between the two so I had no idea the same group had recorded Fool’s Gold or I Wanna Be Adored. John Squire’s guitar work is underrated, and the rhythm section is absolutely locked in. Breaking Into Heaven is the other standout track on this album. The band broke up after this album, reunited in 2011 for a tour, and quietly disbanded again in 2017.
I’m trying to find other things to occupy my mind instead of doomscrolling, and I’m not winning the battle just yet. Many of my projects are on hold waiting for parts or shipments, so I can’t do much right now. The key is to stay off the internet as much as I can and focus on things I have some control over.
I did a yard sale this Saturday for all of the stuff we didn’t sell a few weeks ago; our house is uniquely situated on Main Street so we get plenty of traffic. I didn’t put one sign out. In less than an hour I’d sold a lamp, the keyboard, my glass carboy, a small table, $30 worth of baby clothes, and a bunch of other stuff. One of the things I’d put out was the Danish modern leather chair I inherited from my college roommate, who had inherited it from his father when we came back to school my sophomore year. It was the chair IKEA ripped off when they made the POÄNG, which later appeared in dorm rooms worldwide. It was comfortable, padded well, and made of beautifully laminated wood in single solid pieces (unlike the Swedish ripoff). When we got it, the stitching in the leather was beginning to come unraveled, and over time it got worse. By the time the chair made it to this house, the ottoman was in tatters and the set of the chair was not far behind. Finley used to try and eat the foam as a baby, so we retired it to the attic in the hopes that someday we could have it re-upholstered. After fifteen years, I gave up on that dream and out to the yard sale it went. At noon it was still on the curb with a big FREE sign taped to the cushion, and it stayed out there until this morning; when I got back from dropping Finn at school I noticed it was gone. I will admit, I was hit with a pang of regret; I will miss sitting in that chair as I remember it—all of the leather intact, with a beer, watching Letterman on our thrift-store color TV.
I was bummed out to read yesterday that Panera is discontinuing its line of “charged” lemonades because two people died after drinking too much of it. Two years ago, when we were cleaning out my father-in-law’s house, we were hitting the Panera pretty regularly and I was using the strawberry mint lemonade to push through hot summer weekends humping trash into a dumpster. I liked it because it didn’t have the same laxative effect coffee does to my 50-year-old digestive system. Around here they keep it behind the counter and you have to pay for refills, but I’ve been in other stores where you can just go up and refill it yourself. I wonder if they ever considered that from a failure of design vs. a liability standpoint; I guess we’ll never know.
The YouTube channel has now gotten 110 subscribers, which is roughly 1% of what I’d actually need to monetize the thing. I made an introduction video to beef up the channel and have followed some of the Creators advice that has suddenly popped up in my feed to juice up my stats; the low-hanging fruit seems to be working, albeit slowly. The channel is designed mostly as a way to remember what it is I’ve worked on while also practicing filming and editing skills, and testing out some different methods of shooting things, much like this weblog acts as my institutional memory. Which is good, because the details get very fuzzy before COVID.
Speaking of editing, Apple just announced they’re releasing Final Cut Pro 2.0 sometime later this year, which is good news—so long as they don’t move all the furniture around again. I’m going to have the fellas at work give me a crash course in Adobe Premiere sometime soon so that we can trade files back and forth, but my heart will always live with FCP, much like it did with the dearly departed Aperture.
I’m currently feel very proud of myself; walking the dog this morning, I passed a house with a bunch of stuff out front under a big FREE sign. One of the things was a beautiful steel floor-standing cabinet with a beefy handle/lock combination, several built-in shelves and two enclosed drawers. My lizard brain screamed GO GET THE TRUCK RIGHT NOW but the smaller mammalian section counseled me to do a mental map of the interior of the garage, which is completely full. BUT YOU COULD PUT STUFF IN THERE, lizard brain responded. Try as I might, I don’t have any room, nor do I really need a cabinet such as this with the space that I have. So I kept walking.
And on the way home I resolved to put a bunch of crap in the basement out by the curb on Saturday morning under a FREE sign. Let’s make some more room.